Whether it’s exposing the latest research into Dark Matter or examining the ‘galactic archaeology’ that is trying to unpick the earliest microseconds of the Universe, Professor Joseph Silk’s lecture series will certainly give the audience an idea of the grandeur of the Universe. As well as examining the past and the possible future, Professor Silk discusses the possibility that there might be life on other planets and the efforts to find it.

There are nearly 150 Gresham College lectures every year, all of them free and open to all. Here are some samples from some recent lectures, to give you an idea of the types of things you could learn.All information is available on the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

As Gresham Professor of Astronomy, Carolin Crawford delivers many public lectures a year within the City of London. These are all recorded and released on the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

The guitar is arguably the most widely cultivated instrument in the world. At a time when fifty or more pianos are broken up for scrap in Britain every week – sad relics of Victorian parlour entertainment – sales of guitars have never been higher.Nonetheless, it has been almost universally forgotten that there was an intense guitar craze in England between about 1800 and 1835, spanning the lifetimes of Keats, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge, and a craze whose history has never been traced. Histories of English music and society in the nineteenth century continue to be written as if it never happened, and yet the instrument was cultivated from the royal family in the person of Princess Charlotte (d. 1817) down to the poorest laundress.This is much more than the story of an instrument and its music: the rise of romanticism, the creation of an urban poor hungry for self improvement, the proliferation of newspapers, serialised fiction and printed sheet music, the social position of women and other aspects of English society and culture in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars all have a place within it.

Literature of any merit has its ambiguities and this allows for different readings, giving rise to different interpretations and so, literary critical debate. This series of lectures will focus on four novels and two poems in order to focus on these ‘Mysteries of Writing’.Works have been selected for their popularity or, contrariwise, their relative obscurity, to offer historical range, and to include both English and non-English texts. In analysing a few works in detail, methods of reading will be identified which can be used to unlock from all texts some of their abiding and powerful relevance to human life.